SciPy2013 Proceedings

The talks for the 12th (fantastic) Python in Science conference just concluded, and I am happy to announce the conference proceedings.

This may come as a surprize to some, since in the past we have been unable to publish the proceedings in a timely manner. So, what changed?

Review process

For 2013 we followed a very light-weight review process, via comments on GitHub pull-requests. This change has an important consequence: in contrast to the traditional review process, where reviewers critically pull apart papers, the process now changes into a constructive conversation–the reviewer becomes an ally to the author, helping them to get their paper signed off on.

In addition, this is a very familiar process to most members of our community who regularly collaborate to open source projects. Most such projects nowadays follow a similar methodology for discussing and integrating patches.

Tools

Since we can’t expect reviewers to check out and build the papers themselves, a paper build bot is provided to generate PDFs from pull-requests, which contain papers in plain-text ReStructuredText format (see the proceedings repository for examples, and all papers starting 2010).

For authors, tools are provided to convert the ReStructuredText papers to PDFs in IEEE Computer Society paper style.

Help us with the final review

We welcome your feedback on the proceedings! If you spot a mistake, please submit a pull request on GitHub.

Thanks

Finally, a big shout-out to the amazing team of people who organized this year’s conference, and to the wonderfully inclusive and talented Scientific Python community, of which I am proud to be part of.